Rejon Taylor has spent more than half his life behind bars. In 2008, he was sentenced to death for a homicide committed when he was 18 years old. For 16 years, he lived in solitary confinement on death row at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Despite struggling with temporal lobe epilepsy and PTSD, he is a dedicated artist, poet, and writer. Through many essays and over 300 pieces of art, Rejon Taylor utilizes his creativity to “create connective tissue between a solitary cell and the outside world.” 

On December 23, 2024, alongside 36 other men, Taylor had his death sentence commuted by former President Joe Biden. Less than a month later, Taylor’s joy at receiving clemency was destroyed. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order to expand the use of the death penalty at the federal and state level, undermining Biden’s clemency order. The 37 men whose death sentences were commuted are now set to be transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, the federal government’s only supermax prison, in Florence, Colorado. In a book review of No Human Contact: Solitary Confinement, Maximum Security, and Two Inmates Who Changed the System by Pete Earley, Solitary Watch editor-in-chief Juan Moreno Haines situated the heinous conditions at ADX within the context of the Trump administration’s devastating order.

In the following piece, Taylor unflinchingly describes the feeling of having escaped the looming scythe of death row, only to be caught at another deadly crossroads. More information about Taylor and his work can be found at https://juniperartgallery.com/collections/rejon-taylor —Kilhah St. Fort

• • • • • • • • • •

“This is a brutal place. We’re prisoners. If we run, they’ll try to kill us. Or worse.” —June in “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Season 1: A Woman’s Place) 

While on my way to a visit, I happened upon a man of my status, a man once condemned, locked inside a holding cell on federal death row. In his neck was a wound, raw and red. The wound was stitched shut into a tight smile. It reminded me of the stitched lips of Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Death feels closer after clemency. 

I hadn’t seen him in a couple of days, since the day he’d razor-sliced his neck from ear to ear. He’d just come back from suicide watch, he said, and before that, the outside hospital. 

He gingerly lifted his chin, exhibiting his stitched smile. “Thirty-one stitches,” he said through the bars. The stitches were an unstable blue. The blue cooled the redness of his wound. It was brutal, too. Brutal like this place. Brutal like the state in which we find ourselves. 

Stitched Smile wore bright orange prison garb, though orange isn’t the color my lot wears. Orange is the color of special status, the color of problematic prisoners who were once in general population but are now in segregation, in a unit we’re not allowed to go. But he was in orange—shirt, pants, shoes—bright like a sign of danger. Bright like a venomous snake. 

He extended an arm between the bars, showing me the underside of his left wrist. “Seven stitches,” he said of another stitched wound. I noticed how the stitches were tied, their ends sticking out like cut cat whiskers. If I rubbed them, I thought, they’d scratch me, rendering me death-contagious. 

And with that, my mind blinked back to his solitary cell, the scene of his attempted suicide: the concrete floor stained with blood droplets; the metal shower and toilet smeared with rust-colored blood; a rope, thin and bloody, tied into a noose, hanging from a hook. Hanging without a body, bereft of a corpse. 

A twisted sheet, I thought, would’ve gotten the job done with less mess. Would’ve been more efficient, too. No doubt, he hadn’t thought it through. Maybe it had been a desperate cry for help. Maybe a serious but unsuccessful attempt. 

But what I did know was this: If I’d found myself at the end of my rope, I knew how things would turn out. 

I was transfixed by it all, including my own perceptions. Stitched Smile’s presence stirred in me feelings too dissonant for comfort, thoughts too heavy for casual conversation. Like a Rorschach inkblot test, his presence opened up my own unraveling, evoking unconscious ideations. 

I, too, felt like Stitched Smile, as if I were hanging on—or, in his case, sewed back together—by a thread. But that thread won’t keep us intact for what’s coming, for what’s looming before him, before us. 

•

Ever since Biden granted 37 of us clemency, we’ve been in the crosshairs of petty politics. We are men marked for retribution, targeted for extra-judicial punishment. Unlike any other time, the power of the presidency is impacting the conditions of our confinement. 

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order that directs the Attorney General to imprison the 37 in conditions of monstrosity. And now we are designated for placement at the most restrictive and isolating federal prison in this country: United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado—the Alcatraz of the Rockies. 

This supermax facility has been described by former ADX warden, Robert Hood, as “a clean version of hell,” “not designed for humanity,” and “far much worse than death.” 

There, I fear, they will do to us what they do to political prisoners: Bury us alive inside concrete cells. Isolate us from each other. Restrict our contact with the outside world. All while mind-torturing us to death. It’s always that, the mind-fuck, and the anticipation is already harassing our mind. 

My mind reels and unravels. A sense of doom hovers ahead as I anticipate being buried alive at ADX, cut off from the social world, existing in conditions of monstrosity. I refuse to become subhuman, a mere shell of my social self. To cut me off from the world is to undermine my humanity. To undermine my humanity is by far much worse than death. I’d rather orchestrate my own demise than exist in conditions not designed for humanity. 

This triggers thoughts of another member of the 37, an artist friend of mine who’s been making elaborate plans to string himself up. Daily, he tells me he’s on a “literal deadline” to enact what may be his final work of art. If his conception is concretized, his final work will be, quite literally, a body of work—that is, the artist’s own body as artwork, hanging from a noose. 

His motive: the same as Stitched Smile’s, which may be the same as mine. 

•

Stiched Smile took off his shirt to show me what should’ve been his posthumous statement. Across his chest, in razor-sliced letters, were the same four letters his brother had cut into his skin, in an Indiana county jail in 2009, before slicing his neck to death: T S F L. 

True Soldier For Life. 

•

Life is fragile on the row after clemency. While we know life’s fragility in our bones, we feel its stubborn resistance in our hearts. And because life kicks against outside exterminations, it takes a little more effort, or a better method, maybe even a twisted sheet, to end it. If it ever comes to that, I will find a way to end it. 

You cut me open, Stitched Smile. I’ll write a piece on your art exhibition, Artist Friend. 

And I know of no better way for Stitched Smile to die than at the end of a blade—a gesture of solidarity with his brother’s ghost. It surely beats being a ghost confined to conditions of monstrosity inside a concrete prison tomb at the Alcatraz of the Rockies.